What unseen Star Trek event do you want to read about next?

I think the books have covered a lot of unexplored stories mentioned from the series and movies.

We've had the Romulan War, Eugenics war, The Tomed incident, how Sulu found time to have a family, how Rasmussen got his time pod, who future guy is, what Kirk was up to in his early days, where the Borg came from, Pike's accident, Picard taking command of the Stargazer, his first meeting with Guinan from his perspective.

No! The epicness of such a glorious battle is best left to a warrior's imagination!

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Agreed. And more too the point, I don't think mere words could even capture a hint of the glory of the deeds of that day. The words would dissipate on the pages, and the pages turn into dust if forced to contain the actions of the Great Tribble Hunt.

WWIII would never be done justice, and is so close to our time, that any claims would likely insult someone or another - hence why screenwriters also probably kept it as nebulous as possible, only dropping hints about it's nature.

Since oil reserves are predicted to run out around this century, the population of the planet will be 9 billion around 2050 (UN stats), structural unemployment is rising, the environment is growing worse, and we are already using more than the carrying capacity of this planet in terms of feeding our living standards - my interpretation of WW3 has always been a perfect storm; an apocalypse in which all our short sighted decisions, bigotry, over-consumption, and inability to care for each other's needs fairly, as a species, come back to haunt us. Inter-state warfare, terrorism, revolutions, nuclear annihilation, death camps, mass unemployment, proletarian uprisings, nationalist demagogues, religious fanaticism, torture, zero civil liberties, police states, universal conscription.

But the prejudices of our era would seep into the work - Environmentalism, Nationalism, Islamism, Capitalism, Socialism - the energy crisis, the military-industrial complex, consumerism, imperialism - China, India, the USA, the EU, Japan, Russia - the author's own views on these things, may seep into the work - someone would be insulted, in all likelihood - especially if Eastern Coalition = bad guys.

I don't actually think eras should be explored just for the sake of it, for reasons I was recently talking about elsewhere (the desire to explain every gap is destructive IMO, and can often, but if there was an era - purely theoretically - that I wanted to see, it would be WWIII, or the era just after First Contact, or first contact with the Kzinti, or the Tholian war on the Federation, or the Cardassian War. Purely speculatively, I would like to see a longer, more detailed, Romulan War - but really, I don't want to see any of these things, for the reason mentioned above - they were only ever intended as engimatic references anyway.

Trek should probably go into the far future instead, and go back to it's roots, in exploration and awe - at this point, I don't care about the kind of technologies and logistical ideas established in DS9 and Voyager - Star Trek should be creative and awe inspiring - we might as well have wormhole-drives and exploration of other galaxies.

^Agreed, the Cardassian Wars would be awesome I am also interested in the time period between Enterprise and TOS. We are lucky, Chris Bennett's new book Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures, will cover that era

I would like to see the Federation technologically out evolve or subsume the other Alpha/Beta powers (Romulans, Tzenkethi, Breen, Tholians etc) and expand out into the galaxy running across unusual new allies and enemies, It's already started to a small degree with the slipstream drive.

As for unseen events:

WWIII to Enterprise
Cardassian War
Invention of Transporters
The Pegasus incedent (original)
Other races aftermath of the Desiny events, not just the Federation
Bajoran resistance
Enterprises B&C

I pitched that to Pocket, but got no interest. It wouldn't feature enough familiar characters or elements to be marketable.

Cardassian War

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Portions of this were depicted in Jeri Taylor's Mosaic and Pathways. It didn't seem to be a single major war so much as a series of on-and-off border conflicts.

Invention of Transporters

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Versions of this have been shown in the Wildstorm graphic novel Forgiveness and the Lives of Dax story "Dead Man's Hand," though neither is compatible with canon anymore. There was also an issue of Marvel's post-TMP comic that dealt with it indirectly.

The problem with exploring the invention of the transporter in the current continuity is that it would require revisiting ideas from "Daedalus," which was probably the worst 4th-season ENT episode other than the series finale and that has major continuity errors in it. (How could Emory Erickson have done research in an empty void of space a hundred light years in radius over a decade before NX-01 was launched, given that NX-01's crew were the first humans to go more than a hundred light years from Earth?)

Enterprises B&C

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We've seen a few of their adventures. The E-B in The Captain's Daughter, "Shakedown" in Enterprise Logs, Serpents Among the Ruins, and "Iron and Sacrifice" in Tales from the Captain's Table, and the E-C in Well of Souls, Vulcan's Heart, and "Hour of Fire" in Enterprise Logs.

World War III was already covered in Federation. It may not fit with the TV/film continuity anymore, but it would be an almighty effort to top it quality-wise. Wanting another WWIII book just to tick some post-FC continuity porn boxes seems a little pointless to me.

I pitched that to Pocket, but got no interest. It wouldn't feature enough familiar characters or elements to be marketable.

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I know this is difficult to answer since you might get to tell this story another time but how might you have done it?

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I didn't have solid plans, but I thought it would be cool to organize a multi-author collaboration, sort of a cross between how Mere Anarchy and Vanguard were done. A series of books spanning the whole era and covering major events in that time, from early human-Vulcan relations to the founding of the first human colonies and the rise of the Space Boomers to the Warp 5 Project. But I never actually talked to anyone else about it -- I thought I should float it with the editor first and see if there was any prospect for it before I got anyone else involved.

But it would've been difficult to pull off, and wouldn't have felt too much like Trek, because we couldn't really have used that many aliens -- Vulcans mostly, plus maybe Denobulans and Draylaxians at some point -- and the technology would've been a lot less advanced. It would've felt more like an original near-future SF series than a Trek series -- which would've been an interesting challenge for me creatively, but probably not an easy sell for Trek readers. In retrospect, though, it's more fun to do something like Rise of the Federation where I've got a lot of aliens and interstellar politics and such to play with. And it might give me the opportunity to explore the pre-ENT period in retrospect, at least to some degree.

World War III was already covered in Federation. It may not fit with the TV/film continuity anymore, but it would be an almighty effort to top it quality-wise. Wanting another WWIII book just to tick some post-FC continuity porn boxes seems a little pointless to me.

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Bizzarely enough, I started to read Federation yesterday, and Christopher is correct of course, the Cochrane scenes don't read like Star Trek at all, but as a lover of sci-fi in general, I found those scenes to be the best part of the book.